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10 Dec 2016 2:40:46am

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When Ken Caldeira gave a featured talk entitled "Ocean Acidification: Adaptive Challenge or Extinction Threat?" at the 2012 meeting of the AGU, he was asked in the Q&A afterward, basically, is there a threat of extinction for homo sapiens?

Ken said: "the question is, what if reefs disappear, what does that mean, or to summarize... well who cares? [50:40] And the standard answer is oh that there are vulnerable communities of poor people who depend on them [ coral reefs ] for fish and nutrients and you know there are numbers of how many hundreds of millions of people depend on reefs for their livelihood and tourism and all this kind of stuff. And then there is the other sort of standard answer, oh this is a necessary component of the homeostatic earth system and if we lose these that humans are the next domino to fall. I personally don't believe any of that. I actually think if you sterilize the ocean, yes vulnerable people would be hurt, poor people would be hurt, but that we'd still have Chicken McNuggets and TV shows and basically we'd be OK. And so for me its really this sort of tragedy - and maybe this is a middle class American viewpoint - but that you've had billions of years of evolution producing all this biodiversity and because we want to have - you know economists estimate it would cost something like 2% of GDP to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from our energy system, maybe it would cost a few percent more of GDP so because we want to be a few percent richer we're willing to lose all this, all these ecosystems, we're willing to lose the Arctic ecosystem, we're willing to lose these marine ecosystems and to me its a little bit like somebody saying well I have enough money so I can run through the Metropolitan Museum and just slash up all the paintings.... And so for me being a middle class American who is gonna have TV shows and Chicken McNuggets and burgers and things, for me its more this kind of ethical kind of thing. Obviously, if you depend on your livelihood for fishing on a reef you're going to have a different perspective. But that's enough of that.

Minute 50:20 in the video at this link: http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/events/gc44c-special-lecture-in-ocean-acidification-consequences-of-excess-carbon-dioxide-in-the-marine-environment-video-on-demand/

I am placing Callum's remark that if the oceans were sterilized we'd be running out of oxygen 1,000 years later where Ken will see it.

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